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October 28, 2009

While I have little faith in the company, given their track record, I noticed that Namco was taking suggestions and took the opportunity to write them. Being as I just complained about this game, I thought I would put this up as a follow-up. The letter's after the cut.

October 26, 2009

(I guess now this blog will be the Shitty Things About Good Videogames blog for now)

MMOs are a tough enough proposition when they're subscription-based. The more you play, the less fun the game becomes and the more obligated the player begins to feel. This is why I don't take them up for longer than a few days: I have fun at low levels, and once the game starts to look boring, I can leave it alone forever. The twist with Dungeon Fighter is that it's an MMO beat-em-up in the style of 90's arcade games: the closest comparison is if somebody were to make Capcom's classic Dungeons and Dragons arcade games into a full-fledged MMO.

This is key for me: the big thing MMORPGs miss, in their scrambling over stats and loot and meta-gamey stuff, is that the key activity isn't any fun. Clicking a monster and sitting back as my guy fights it is neither very involving nor very exciting. Actually punching hordes of monsters? In their faces? Sounds to me like somebody's made the fun connection.

So Dungeon Fighter and I had a pretty good run, especially when my character became Dudley from Street Fighter 3. My character was getting noticeably stronger, new stages to fight on came fast, and I always had a side quest to take care of while I juggle comboed goblins and golems and knights for days.

Unfortunately, like many MMOs, the rate of progress eventually hits a brick wall. Quests stop appearing, new maps stop showing up so often, and the only way to level up is to play the same stage over and over again. On the next level, you hope the game gives you a sidequest or a new map or something, but nothing ever appears and before you know it you're stuck grinding.The game is satisfying enough to play for its own sake for a little while, but you try running the same long level in Streets of Rage five times in a row and tell me if you're still having fun, because that's what happens in Dungeon Fighter.

Something felt wrong and unnatural about the way the game had just quit on being fun, so I decided to do some research on the game's boards. Here I found out that it wasn't just me. The entire player base was livid about two things in particular: the tedious rate of leveling up and the ludicrous costs of cash items, both of which have been adjusted substantially from the game's Asian versions. I'd only been getting half the experience points all this time!

There were no quests because aside from turning down the dial on XP, the people running the game didn't bother to think about how such a major change would affect the game flow. Of course, it throws a wrench into the whole thing, crippling advancement and leaving the player with nothing interesting to do for long stretches. Goes to show that game design changes are best left to actual game designers.

As for the cash items, this is the same burn that every "free-to-play" game performs: it's free to start, yes, but if you want to use certain basic functions that every regular player is going to want, it will cost you. "Free-to-play" really needs a relabeling: it's not that it isn't possible to play for free, it's just extremely impractical to actually do so. Selling items to other players (a major source of income) costs a little bit of money, extra storage space costs a little bit. It's nothing backbreaking-- you can get a perfectly good setup going for $10-- but the higher up you go, the higher the costs rise. And, of course, buying items for this game costs way more than in its Asian equivalents.

Clothing items, for example, are bought via an in-game gashapon machine that gives you something you may not even want for your $2.50. (Korea gets to choose, Japan does not.) Unwanted items can be sold to other players, which is funny, because paying a huge amount of gold for the item you want is the better choice by a mile than throwing real money at the game in hopes of getting it at random. In the highest-level fuck-you, endgame players are charged a shocking $25 to go back and tweak their skills for player vs. player play: this is an essential step for the PvP player and they charge what they do because it's a "gotcha by the balls" situation. Free-to-play is dangerous, man.

Players complain about these issues, but the staff engages them infrequently, if at all. When they do, the results aren't encouraging, as seen in this GM thread, where GMs acknowledge that the problems exist while not actually displaying any intentions of fixing them. These guys seem to have been complaining for a while to no avail, so I don't expect things on DFO to get better any time soon. I'll probably come back in a few months and see if anything's been fixed, but Nexon appears kind of greedy and incompetent. Doesn't exactly inspire any confidence. Maybe I'll give the Japanese version a shot.

October 25, 2009

Hey kids! Want to know how to get fight money fast in Scenario Campaign? Take a look here!

Well, guys, my store broke street date, and I have Tekken 6 a couple of days before I should. Barring online mode-- which I presume will be patched in when the game actually launches and the servers are up-- everything is in my hands. Considering the situation, I figured it would be cool to write something up. I haven't played Tekken with any enthusiasm since the mid-90s, so you'll have to excuse me for knowing very little about the game. But this post isn't really about the home version of Tekken 6, it's about the terrible, boring thing that Namco decided to tack onto the game. This post is about Scenario Campaign mode.

God, that name. It sounds like it went directly from a marketing guy's bulleted list to the game. "We'll have a, uh, Scenario Campaign mode! For the longevity!" Scenario Campaign mode has but one design goal: to make the average buyer's experience with Tekken 6 longer. Whether it's fun or not isn't really the issue: it's about keeping your ass in the chair long enough to keep you from selling the game to somebody else (or at Gamestop, if you're a sucker). It's filler.

Now it's common practice, and usually a good idea, to puff out a home port of an arcade game with extra modes and content. Blazblue did this very well with it's limited edition package and big story mode, Street Fighter IV did it lazily with unlockable items that were more a chore than a gift for the player, and Tekken 6 has this. It tries harder than, say, Street Fighter IV did, but that's not saying much. Even if they were trying, this idea would be fundamentally flawed: it tries to shove Tekken 6 into a genre it's just not suited for.

Namco's been doing this since the Tekken Force mode in Tekken 3 about ten years ago, and they haven't gotten it right any time since. This wasn't much of a deal back then, because Tekken games have been overstuffed packages for years and Tekken Force was but one of many silly bonus features every game got-- I believe Tekken Tag had a volleyball mode? I'm particularly harsh with Scenario Campaign because it gets this game's top billing: it's the first item menu, and the whole rest of the game is practically hidden in a sub-menu. Most of the achievements, even, are things you will do in Campaign mode. The people who put together this port of Tekken 6 expected that everybody who bought it would play Campaign at some point. As such, there's really no excuse for how lousy it is.

Tekken 6 is a one-on-one fighting game, as you probably know. Scenario Campaign mode is a one-versus-many fighting game.
From a design point of view, these genres have to be handled in
completely different ways: control, character design, stage design, everything.
That is, if you want the game to be a quality piece of work, you do
that. If you're Tekken you just lazily graft one onto the other and
call it a day.

The resulting game is really sloppy and uncomfortable: because your character wasn't designed to deal with a big crowd, you typically have to take guys down one at a time. As in a fighting game, you're locked in a straight line to your target. The problem with this is that you've got five other guys locked on straight lines to you too, and you can't very easily move around them. Fighting game controls are great for getting to one guy and beating him up: they are not great for getting around a room. Get ready to find yourself unable to reach that too-close, too-far lifesaving weapon or health item... repeatedly.

On top of that, the fixed camera is working against you, regularly making it unclear where to go, where your dumb AI buddy is, or where the enemy you're supposed to be fighting right now is. If you've got guys in front of you you're often completely unable to see yourself. Also, the one-button targeting system often picks the wrong guy, and inexplicably doesn't shift from enemies you've already killed. And don't get me started on what happens when you're too far away from a guy with a gun! Level and enemy design are essentially the same every time, and there is one level for all of the game's 40 (!!) characters. It grates, and it grates fast. Little annoyances like this pile up on top of each other until you're pulling your face off. Especially if you're me, and you're running through it really fast so you can tell your internet friends about it before the game formally comes out.

And then there's the story: this is the story mode, after all. If you're absolutely obsessed with the Tekken storyline (which, like most fighting game stories, is total nonsense not worth telling) and don't mind long cutscenes about it, then you're the target audience for this and maybe you won't skip the majority of them like I did. I never skip story cutscenes in games, but when I realized that the ten-minute history of the entire Tekken series was only the first cutscene, and that three more cutscenes followed, I started hitting that skip button, and hard.

In a nutshell, new protagonist Lars Alexandersson, the Scandinavian, illegitimate son of Tekken patriarch Heihachi Mishima, goes out on an adventure of revenge with his moe robot girlfriend, Alisa Bosconovich. They're always posed the exact same way as they talk before every level. With the ridiculous costume items you put on them to improve their stats (yes, there are tacked-on RPG elements too), they kind of reminded me of the protagonists of a very dry gag manga-- a Cromartie or something. Except instead of a delinquent and a monkey, it's a spiky-haired Japanese videogame hero and a space hooker wearing star-shaped sunglasses and a cowgirl hat. Perhaps they're more like the Fuccons?

So this mode kind of sucks, is what I'm saying. Games shouldn't try to be all things to all people, because shit like this happens. If I could just avoid it, I would, but I can't. See, the game has this "fight money" system going. If you want to customize your character (ie. dress them up and make them fancy), you need a ton of fight money: there are single items in the in-game store that cost more than I got on my entire run through Campaign mode. The fastest way to get fight money, as far as I can tell, seems to be to keep playing this crappy game. Actually playing Tekken 6, the pretty solid fighting game, gets you peanuts by comparison. Even beating Arcade mode repeatedly-- this is still boring, but at least the game you're playing doesn't suck-- yields relatively small gains.

It's that much worse because not only will I have to play this thing, I'm going to have to play it a lot, when I'd much rather be playing the real game. You know, the one-on-one fighting game that's a distant memory by now. I grudgingly accept a little grind here and there, but this is just not acceptable. It's poor design, plain and simple. I'd be surprised if Bandai Namco, greedy fuckers that they are, didn't charge people five bucks to unlock the items without the work. I'm going to go ahead and call that a prediction. Watch it happen.

(My second prediction, by the way, is that Tekken 6 gets great reviews in the mainstream gamer press for Scenario Campaign because it adds replay value and hours are very important. The PS2-grade graphics will probably be the main complaint.)

11.8.09 Update: I was wrong about the second one, by the way! Nobody in the gaming press liked Scenario Campaign either. This is like that time I said "A $200 videogame? They're crazy! Rock Band won't sell!"

October 24, 2009

This is just a quick heads-up, but it's way too good to keep to the Twitter.

A couple months back, I watched and loved Nobuhiko Obayashi's surreal 1977 horror movie House. I loved it so much, in fact, that I urged you readers to see it any way you could. As such, I'm pleased to report that starting next week, House will actually be running in a few cities! This is especially nice for me, as there's a showing Halloween night, and Halloween is my birthday. This cosmic gift pleases me. If you can make it to any of these shows, do so: you won't be disappointed.

October 19, 2009

A lot has been said about how weak the current anime season is. To this I say "shut up, I'm watching Sunred." It's hard not to see a wall of shitty late-night porn game adaptations and moe exploitation and lose all hope for the medium, of course, but don't all of us right-thinking people just skip that stuff anyway? Let's talk about a good cartoon.

I was interested in Trapeze from the moment I saw the trailer, in large part due to Denki Groove's involvement with the music. If Denki Groove is down for something, it's probably a safe bet, I figure. As you can see here, it's a heavily stylized live-action/animation hybrid. This is not exactly a Roger Rabbit situation: rather, in one shot we see an actor, in another we see a cartoon, and in others, the same person is a little bit an actor and a little bit a cartoon. It also happens to be about a psychiatrist in a bear (?) costume who gets off on injections.

In this first episode, Ichiro Irabu's patient, a trapeze artist, has a pretty mundane problem with a mundane solution. You're probably not going to notice, though, because the way the story is told is so strange. It isn't hard to follow, mind you, just strange. As I mentioned before, everything is constantly changing: the doctor him/herself takes three forms and seems to be voiced by three different people. The show's running theme appears to be multiple personalities and the way people subconsciously become different selves, but it remains to be seen where that goes. Until then, I recommend you kick back and enjoy the music.

I would also feel like I was cheating my audience if I didn't mention the hot nurse. Damn.

October 17, 2009

Last night I finally got to see Black Dynamite, which I had been eagerly awaiting for some time. It's a very small release, and unless you live in NYC, LA, Chicago, Philly, Seattle, or Atlanta you won't be able to see it. That said, if you do live in one of these towns and you like fun, you would be be seriously remiss in not seeing this movie.

As you might have gathered from the trailer, Black Dynamite is a blaxploitation spoof: if you're not familiar with that-- I guess you might not be, I guess this is supposed to be an otaku blog-- we're talking about a wave of B-movies that specifically targeted black audiences back in the 70s. You've probably heard the names Shaft, Foxy Brown, and Superfly before. These movies have a lasting camp appeal, and this isn't the first time somebody's homaged them. It is, however, probably the first time somebody's homaged them so thoroughly: this director should probably be awarded a degree in Blaxploitation Studies.

At the start it's kind of tough to even call Black Dynamite a spoof, because it's so dead on. Fake Rudy Ray Moore who speaks only in poorly-metered rhyme, check. Fake Pam Grier, check. Boom mic in the frame, you got it. Even when the movie breaks into song about exactly what is going on in this scene right now, it's not too far off from what the bottom-of-the-barrel blaxploitation movies were really like. In fact, terrible production values are less a running gag than a way of life for this movie: weird cuts, people standing in places they shouldn't be, and awkward silences after bad line readings are all common. This is no slick studio production: it's going for that Dolemite, that Fred Williamson vibe.

And yes, it works. We had a pretty small crowd in attendance (small movie, limited run, limited advertising, people don't know this movie exists), but the movie managed to keep all of us laughing for nearly its entire running time. There isn't a line in this script that isn't funny: when the guys and I got out of the theater, all we could talk about for an hour were all the awesome things people said in this movie. Check out the soundboard for some examples, but be warned that this, and even the amazing trailer, only give away a tiny bit of how awesome Black Dynamite actually turned out to be. I'm deliberately withholding information from that is too awesome not to find out in the theater. Don't look up plot details: go see the movie instead.

So not only were my expectations met, they were actually exceeded. Considering my expectations were high enough from the trailer, this is really something! If you're in a city this movie is playing in, I'm telling you, it will not disappoint. Get out there and see this movie on the big screen while you can, before it inevitably becomes a cult hit on DVD and cable.

October 08, 2009

Well, alright, it's second place, next to an uncensored print of the Fist of the North Star movie suddenly appearing out of nowhere. But every time I recall this oddity, I wish I had it again, and I look for it, and there's nothing.

Yes, it's awful. The fansubbers at Anime-Otakus, who had translated the entire TV series, saw fit to dub an episode, despite lacking things like actors. What resulted was 25 minutes of a fansubber reading his own script emotionlessly for every single guy in the show. There was a girl to cover the two female characters, and did I forget to mention that the fansubber also dubs the opening and ending theme songs?

The great thing about this dub is how strictly it adheres to the rules for fan subtitles, utterly ignoring how things actually sound in English. There is no rewriting of the fansub script, highlighting the fact that the average fansub script sounds nothing like a conversation between human beings. Segments of dialogue are even timed to when one would imagine the subtitles appear on screen. The coup de grace is that the hero's catchphrase, "mada mada da ne"-- which is a "you've got a long way to go" kind of statement-- is left untranslated. It is the absolute height of hilarity to hear this line spoken in English in the middle of conversation. I can't explain it. It's too wonderful.

It's a pretty amazing watch for a bad anime enthusiast like me, and I can't find it anywhere. I just spent the afternoon digging through my archives from around the time it came out, and there's nothing. The only things that come up on Google are little posts like this: the fansubber appears defunct, and I really doubt they were proud of this after the kind of feedback they must have received. Note the comment on that post: apparently there were three episodes of this.

So, in conclusion, I'm putting out a formal call to the entire internet: if you have any or all of Prince of Tennis fandub by Anime-Otakus, kindly hook me up. I miss it so, and the internet will be a better place with it freely available on, say, Youtube or some such.

October 07, 2009

I like Raiden because there's no gimmick, nothing special about it. It's an old-fashioned shooting game. You fly a ship, you shoot the bad guys, the bad guys shoot at you. The deeper gameplay of the games varies, but the aesthetic and the basics tend not to. Some people call this bland-- perhaps it is-- but Raiden is consistently well-made, and that trumps aesthetic every time.

This arcade port of Raiden IV is pretty standard: a couple of levels and ships have been added for the home version, along with the usual score attack, boss rush, and online leaderboards, but that's about it. There have been some complaints about the way you get the other two ships, which is by putting down a dollar for each. This probably wasn't the smartest way to do things, but a dollar isn't really backbreaking for new ships either. Because there doesn't seem to be a lot about the ships online, I'll go ahead and describe them so you can decide whether or not to pay.

The Raiden Mk.II is the original ship from the old Raiden games, and it plays exactly the same as it did. It's as slow as the old ship, too, which limits its usefulness to people who really know what they're doing. By contrast, the Fairy is much faster (and, I'm pretty sure, harder to hit) than the other two ships, making it a potential beginner choice, and a lot of fun. It's not overpowering like in Raiden Fighters, though. If they'd been over a dollar I probably wouldn't have bought them.

The scoring gimmick goes like this: the faster you kill the enemy when it appears on the screen, the more points it's worth. However, if you go without firing for about a second and a half, your ship glows and you can fire a charged volley of missiles (a flash shot, in game terminology): every one of those missiles that hits something is worth 500 points, which can come out to a lot in the right situation. The trick to scoring is figuring out when and where the enemies come in so you can get them as fast as possible, and then to figure out when you can take a break to fire the flash shot.

Meanwhile, of course, you're being shot at. This is different from, say, a Cave or Touhou game, where enemies simply fire with no particular sense of where you are. In Raiden, enemies are actively gunning at you, and you need to be moving at all times. From the second level on, you're dealing with a ton of bullets, and you really need to worry about leading their fire and not getting trapped. The difficulty scales up a lot faster than most shooters I know, but if it puts you off, there is an Easy mode, and a "no shooting at me" mode if you really want to be bored.

This is a good game, but it's not really a purchase for the casual genre fan: it is $40, and you can get Raiden Fighters Aces and its three fantastic games for $20, not to mention the small array of shooters available on the various download services. If you liked Aces, on the other hand, you should (probably already have) give this a look.

October 05, 2009

I hope you didn't find out anything about this episode during the wait for its release: I know I avoided every place that might possibly have been talking about it. I was pretty sure of the big thing (we'll get to it), but the rest of it was a series of very happy surprises.

Dr. Hell's King of Hell (which has faces on the sides of its face) is rampaging around, and both the Mazinger Army and the fancy new weaponized Photon Power Labs are completely useless against it. Obviously, it falls to Kouji to take care of it.

Now this is where the Baron Ashura Show (and make no mistake, we were warned halfway through the series for very good reason) gets complicated: it is revealed that Ashura had actually joined forces with Tsubasa and Kouji, unbeknownst to everybody, when they were inside the Mycenae pillar. Why would this happen? Remember that there was a part of the Kedora's memories that we were never shown: Kouji would just say "we saw a lot of things in there I don't wanna talk about." What they actually saw was grounds for Ashura to backstab Dr. Hell. Remember that Ashura is supposed to be a fusion of two half-rotted bodies, and that the rotting is never really accounted for in the story of this show or the original Mazinger. It just kind of happened.

The truth is much nastier: Dr. Hell and Kenzo Kabuto actually half-rotted the bodies themselves so as to have one less person to deal with when they stitched it back together. For good measure, they obliterated the remains of the Mycenae civilization that was preserved inside of Bardos. So, as it's all part of the plan, Ashura fishes a waterlogged Kouji and his Pilder out of the ocean to fight Dr. Hell. But wait, Mazinger's still down there! What the hell is Kouji going to do from his Pilder against this mightiest of evil robots? Isn't it obvious? He's going to punch it. Over and over again, in the most awesome way possible. No, seriously, if you haven't seen this, then don't let me be the one to tell you how it happened.

Kouji makes it rain. Inside the mechanical corpses of the defeated Mazinger Army are hundreds of Rocket Punches, which fly up and fall onto the King of Hell from the sky. Kouji wrecks the body with a machinegun hail of Rocket Punch fire. He then calls back all the punches to become one huge Rocket Punch, which he then flies directly through the King of Hell's body before completely obliterating it with a Big Bang Punch. Meanwhile, the show is hinting that this was actually a terrible idea, but I, the viewer, cannot bring myself to care because what just happened is so fucking awesome.

Well, it was a terrible idea anyway, and here's why: this was all stage two of the Baron Ashura Triplecross. Let's give Baron Ashura a hand: for all the scheming that was going on in this show, Ashura, of all people, ends up the decisive winner. It turns out that Dr. Hell's goal was not to take over the world and Photon Power for its own sake: it was to take over the world and defend it from the Mycenae with Photon Power. Oh, Dr. Hell. You could have been less of a dick about protecting the earth from giant god-monsters. If you'd just sat everybody around a table and had a talk, maybe they could have worked this out. But they didn't, and Dr. Hell's death actually makes a huge mess of everything. Remember how Ashura couldn't commit suicide as long as Dr. Hell was alive? Well, that's pretty important, because as it turns out, it is Ashura's blood that is necessary to revive the ancient gods of Mycenae. As the credits roll, Ashura tears itself in half with its bare hands, and an army of seven appears before Kouji. They are led by the Grand General of Darkness (Ankoku Daishogun), who, in the final moments, unsheathes his sword and slices Mount Fuji in half.

And that's exactly where it ends. I had said a few posts back that the best possible conclusion would be a revisiting of the fantastic 70's movie Mazinger Z vs. Ankoku Daishogun (which transitions from Mazinger Z to Great Mazinger) in the form of a movie or special, and this has got me very hopeful. This show isn't over. Great-hen is probably going to happen, and there's a possiblity of the movie or special I was talking about, but nobody's said anything and any new stuff is probably a ways off. You'll live.

So how about this show, you guys? Putting the inconsistent animation aside, this was a hell of a ride all the way through. Giant robots are fun and all, but as Tomino will tell you, they're not enough by themselves. This show really sold on its twisting narrative, strong characters, and, of course the fact that nearly every episode had some kind of "oh my god holy shit" payoff. It's great to see Imagawa get to make an epic again, and I really hope everything continues to go as planned. For the time being, though, these writeups will end and I'll have to find something else to talk about. Oh well!

October 04, 2009

Well guys, Shin Mazinger Shougeki Z-hen on television is over, and seeing as I've been busy anyway-- I have grown a serious blogger backlog that I haven't been too great about clearing up-- I decided to do a special double-post for the last two episodes. Hope you guys enjoy.

Boy, things were still a total mess last week, weren't they? Kouji and Mazinger were mobbed with robo-monsters, the Photon Power Labs self-destructed, and only the Kurogane Five stood between Ashura and Kurogane House. Well, as it turned out, the God Scrander Cavalry saves the day courtesy of Computer Grandpa, there's a real Photon Power Lab under the old one that's way better anyway, and the Kurogane gang are protected by the, uh, capable Boss Borot. The fight between Dr. Hell and everybody else is still hurtling towards its conclusion.

This Blade appearance is exactly the same as the Blade appearance from the very first episode, but he gets the Hype Award for killing Pygman as abruptly and effortlessly as possible. As the narrator hypes him up, Blade cuts out as quickly as he appeared, leaving Anokuji to remind the audience that this is a story for another time. Sorry, Great fans, but if you wanted to know any more than this, you're just going to have to wait. Great-hen has been repeatedly hinted at by the mechanical designer and is very likely to happen given the success of Z-hen, but Giant Robo fans remember that time Imagawa promised a sprawling epic. We remain cautious.

Running out of options and generals, Dr. Hell desperately launches Bardos Island... which was exactly what Tsubasa had wanted him to do. Everything up until now has just been part of the plan: even Kouji rushing into battle instead of going with "the plan" was completely intentional. Once Bardos is up in the air, the reinforced Mazinger Corps surround and bombard it. But wait! Taking down Bardos Island was part of Dr. Hell's plan all along! Wait... what? Behold the final Dr. Hell robot, the King of Hell! Plus there's nothing left of Kenzo but the Kedora! I don't even know anymore, man! Good thing there's another post coming...